Susie, being Susie, couldn’t understand why Hazel had flipped so badly over something that was water off a dyke’s back to her, and had confided in Paddy as much to assure herself that she’d done nothing wrong more than anything else. Naturally, Hazel was less keen for the story to break.
Well I’d show her who couldn’t keep a secret.
I was just starting to feel a tad better about myself when one last image flashed across my brain. Again, it was here, we were all sitting around the table doing the last few lines and Paddy was telling us his story when I was struck down with a severe case of honesty and I’d told them about…
Oh bollocks…
… about phoning Gemma in Manchester. No no no, I thought, screwing my face up as I cringed at the image of myself going into every tiny embarrassing detail as I unburdened myself. Even after ten minutes of banging on about it, when they were starting to get bored with the whole confession, the coke told me to keep their attention with ever more humiliating revelations. Fuck.
Why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut?
What was wrong with me?
Well, that was it. I was giving up the booze. I’d been kidding myself that I was going to cut down for years but this put the lid on it. No more. I just couldn’t go on the way I was going. Jesus, I was just becoming known as a real cock when really that wasn’t me. I was a serious-minded, sensitive, even shy sort of guy who had things to say and wisdom to pass on; not someone who’d walk around with the fat end of a pool cue sticking out of his flies for half an hour in the hope that someone might notice and laugh. I was sick of making a cunt of myself and it just wasn’t me. Booze (and especially coke) was doing mad things to me, stupid things and I’d come to hate it. I loved a pint, I won’t deny that, but in recent years I’d really started to hate getting plastered. I didn’t want to do it any more, I didn’t want to be seen as king of the wankers anymore and last night was exactly what I was talking about.
Christ, no wonder nobody took me seriously. What an arsehole!
Well that was it, that was my final session. If no other good came out of last night then at least it finally put me on the wagon. From this moment on I would be a quiet, easy-going and unassuming sort of bloke. A happy-go-lucky fella who spent his time reading or having dinner parties or going down the gym or fishing or something, and I’d be happier for it.
I didn’t need to drink and I didn’t want it any more. I was finished with it. Some blokes might piss away their lives on the sauce but I wouldn’t be one of them. I’d seen the light and I swore that from this moment on that I was a changed man. From now on, people would come to regard me as an intelligent and level-headed fella, someone they could rely on, someone they could trust. Someone who could be turned to for advice, someone to look up to, admire even. Above all, I would become someone to respect.
This was my future and I was looking forward to becoming this person already.
In the meantime, I’d just lie and tell everyone that I couldn’t remember anything about last night.
10. The Dirty Dozen
Naturally, I was in the pub and fucking steaming less than 74 hours later. I’d successfully managed to swerve the beer and lead a totally monastic existence for one weekend but all that went for a toss with the arrival of Monday lunchtime and Paddy’s birthday. I tried to make my apologies and duck out of it but my will was crushed with a chorus of ‘don’t be a cunt’ from the lads. A three-drink minimum was rigorously enforced by Paddy to stop people from gaying off and by pint number five I couldn’t remember why I’d tried giving up in the first place.
Male peer pressure? And we wonder why we die first.
It got my old lady’s back up no end. I’d told her Saturday morning in a phone call that I was finished with the drink and she couldn’t have been happier if I’d told her that I was quitting porn for a nice respectable accountancy job and settling down at the end of her road with some brainless baby-making blob. A few days later she phoned again to find out how things were going and I told her that the wagon hadn’t so much gone over a bump as fallen off a cliff. She was very disappointed. I tried to explain that it was Paddy’s birthday and that I had to go for a drink and then Tuesday there was a big Champions’ League game on that was only being shown in the pubs and then Wednesday we always went for a midweek drink after work to kind of break up the monotony of it all and so on to Thursday which was so close to Friday that it practically was Friday and who didn’t have a drink on Friday for fuck’s sake? She didn’t understand.
Well, it’s a bloke thing to be fair.
As much as I was disappointed with myself for drinking again, it was a relief to be back in the bosom of my brethren. Not much was said about my behaviour from the previous Thursday by any of the boys because, by and large, they accepted it. I was off my nuts and that’s what people do when they’re off their nuts. It was very reassuring.
The same, however, couldn’t be said of the girls. Neither Mary nor Jackie (nor Susie, for reasons of solidarity and because I’d supported Don’s walkout) would talk to me. This uncomfortable silence lasted for several weeks and had me walking around on eggshells, although even when they did come around and eventually spoke to me again, they did so with such ill-disguised contempt that I wished they’d go back to ignoring me.
And then there was Hazel. Hazel smiled at me from across the room, passed notes and spent weeks cracking arse jokes in front of everyone that were aimed solely at me. Paddy and a couple of the others knew what she was getting at but everyone else was left scratching their heads in bewilderment until one day, when she wasn’t there, I told them that she’d confessed to me that she loved it up the arse and that she was just making jokes at her own expense. Most people believed this and from that day onwards got a little embarrassed for her each time she shouted some crude and graphic anal comment across the room.
All in all though, I didn’t feel too good about myself around the office during this time and tried to spend as much of my working week in the pub as I could. And this was happily possible thanks to Stuart being permanently ‘away on a shoot’ – ‘away on a shoot’ being Editor-speak for going on the lash himself or playing golf or learning Spanish in the garden or something. In fact, ‘away on a shoot’ had come to mean just about anything except being ‘away on a shoot’. I didn’t know this for a fact but Stuart went on so many shoots that Bling should’ve had a bigger cast than Ben Hur. And it was during one of Stuart’s absences that I got the chance to go ‘away on a shoot’ myself with Paddy, though this time, ‘away on a shoot’ actually meant ‘away on a shoot’.
And what a shoot it was too. What a shoot.
*
‘Okay, can you all squeeze together and bend over for me. That’s it, that’s it, right, now smile,’ Howard joked as twelve ladies’ arseholes stared back at us.
‘It’s like a bike rack,’ fat Paul said, his jaw at knee level.
This was Ace’s shoot. Ace was celebrating its twelfth birthday so Paddy decided to commission a twelve-girl shoot and run it across a dozen pages; ‘The Dirty Dozen’ being the screamingly obvious cover line. Paul had come along to see the spectacle, Hasseem was meant to be here to but hadn’t shown up (must’ve had something better on), while Matt had desperately wanted to come but had just started seeing a girl he was all dizzy about and she’d put a block on any and all future studio work. Matt could’ve simply lied and told her he’d never come but Matt had a serious case of the ‘considerations’ and insisted he’d always be honest in his dealings with Penny. The silly cunt would get dumped within a month and never live to see twelve naked women in the same room again. It would be a regret Matt would still be torturing himself with forty years later when he was old, grey and as impotent as a glass of water. In Matt’s place, Paddy had invited me.